Pope Francis Seizes Vatican Bank
Francis has moved the Vatican Bank from the Secretariat of State, normally headed by an archbishop or a cardinal archbishop, to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, in other words, placing the bank directly, for the first time in its chequered history, under the Pope. To draw a somewhat clumsy analogy, this is akin to President Kennedy's National Security Action Memorandum, that removed the CIA from oversight of covert operations, and placed those operations directly under the military, i.e., directly under the chain of command ending in the Presidency. In effect, what Francis has done is to move the whole “hidden system of finance” that is the Vatican Bank, a participant in that global “hidden system” that I've speculated about for so long, and placed it directly under papal control.
